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Set in a parallel yet all too familiar near past, a brilliant subversive novel from the New York Times bestselling author about a lifelong friendship threatened by the Culture Wars.
In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.
A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah's Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she's also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children's spirit in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.
With echoes of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, told in Lionel Shriver's inimitable and iconoclastic voice, Mania is a sharp, acerbic, and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional, self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.
"Lionel Shriver is oddly unpredictable-and that's what keeps her interesting. She seems to actively resist satisfying expectations." - Washington Post
"Her best novel since The Post-Birthday World . . . . A return to form, merging Shriver's better instincts as both novelist and social critic." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Motion of the Body Through Space is notionally about fitness fanaticism, but it's really about physical decline and mortality . . . . What's remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters' ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding." - Ariel Levy, The New Yorker
"An exotic and inventive first novel ... It is hard not to admire the breadth and consistency of Lionel Shriver's inventiveness and the exuberance of her imagination." - New York Times Book Review
"The world that the Mandible family must negotiate is evoked in seamless detail… One thing I really like is her coining of made-up slang for her younger generation of characters and her resolutely materialist analysis of what could be coming." - Irvine Welsh, The Guardian
In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.
A college English instructor, the constitutionally rebellious Pearson Converse rejected her restrictive Jehovah's Witness upbringing as a teenager, and so has an aversion to dogma of any kind. Made impotent in the university classroom, she's also enraged by the crushing of her exceptionally bright children's spirit in primary school. Fortunately, she enjoys the confidence of a best friend, a media commentator with whom she can speak frankly about her socially unacceptable contempt for the MP movement. Or at least she thinks she can . . . until one day the political chasm between the two women becomes uncrossable, and a lifelong relationship implodes.
With echoes of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, told in Lionel Shriver's inimitable and iconoclastic voice, Mania is a sharp, acerbic, and ruthlessly funny book about the road to a delusional, self-destructive egalitarianism that our society is already on.
"Lionel Shriver is oddly unpredictable-and that's what keeps her interesting. She seems to actively resist satisfying expectations." - Washington Post
"Her best novel since The Post-Birthday World . . . . A return to form, merging Shriver's better instincts as both novelist and social critic." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Motion of the Body Through Space is notionally about fitness fanaticism, but it's really about physical decline and mortality . . . . What's remarkable is that Shriver, who is at her most lyrical and compelling when contemplating her characters' ambivalence, is so inordinately assured of her positions on real-world issues that many of us find confounding." - Ariel Levy, The New Yorker
"An exotic and inventive first novel ... It is hard not to admire the breadth and consistency of Lionel Shriver's inventiveness and the exuberance of her imagination." - New York Times Book Review
"The world that the Mandible family must negotiate is evoked in seamless detail… One thing I really like is her coining of made-up slang for her younger generation of characters and her resolutely materialist analysis of what could be coming." - Irvine Welsh, The Guardian